Monday, May 30, 2016

Memorial Day newspaper column

Appearing today in the Daily Hampshire Gazette under the title "Our Selective Memorial Day Memory:"

A couple of years back, my sister took to emailing me bits
and pieces of family history. For a while, it was like eating potato
chips, but in the end my genealogical interest flagged: It might be
interesting to know the employment and offspring of one forbear or
another, but it didn't tell me what I really wanted to know: What made
these people laugh; were they yo-yo champs; what demons haunted or
delighted them; and how did they react to a fart under the covers?

These
are impossible questions to answer and yet without answering them, how
much could I really know about "where I came from?" And it occurred to
me that genealogy, and by extension history, was a study whose
particulars were paradoxical: The more you learned, the more you became
aware of what you did not know.

Today is Memorial Day. As ever,
the day is dedicated to those who died while serving in the country's
armed forces. The day is often draped with words like "patriot" and
"hero" and "glory" and "courage" and "sacrifice" and, yes, even "love."
In passing, someone is likely to mention the "sanctity of human life."
Meanwhile, those who stood on the battlefield might wish desperately
that they could forget what others attempt to remember today.

American
military adventures include, but are not limited to, the Revolution,
the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the
Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the
Vietnam War and various interventions and invasions in the Middle East.
Each was supported in its time by a reasoning that involved the human
capacity to forget.

Yes, there were a dizzying number of reasons
to fight, but was that an excuse to forget the genealogy of war that
preceded it? Was a battle-tested soldier like Napoleon Bonaparte wrong
when he observed, "If you had seen one day of war, you would pray God
that you might never see another?" Was Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman
just blowing boozy after-dinner cigar smoke when he said bluntly, "War
is hell."

If history is any guide, these men were not wrong, but hell is pretty damned tempting ... again.

Memorial
Day's broad-brush capacity to selectively remember the dead and
implicitly extol the ideas that led to those deaths leaves out the
fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, spouses and friends who
survived and mourned and were shredded by a bloodshed far from home. It
leaves out the veterans who hang themselves in basements. It leaves out
the silenced screams of the mother who was quoted as saying of her own
son, a Vietnam War veteran, "I sent them a good boy and they made him a
murderer."

On Memorial Day, with its long history of
forgetfulness, what person in his right mind would imagine that peace is
the absence of war? Genealogically, war is easy to grasp and chart.
Peace – the stuff any man or woman might long for – remains wispy and
hungering, a personal responsibility almost too enormous to bear. This
is a realm in which the communist dictator Joseph Stalin's words ring
true: "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." No one
wants kith and kin to be counted as a statistic and yet Memorial Day is
rife with statistics that cannot paper over the longing for peace.

Take
Capt. Thomas Moore. Moore died in 1843. His gravestone stands tall in
the Gate Cemetery that bellies up to Ireland Street in West
Chesterfield. Moore, the gravestone announces, died at 91 and then, as
if to differentiate this man from his genealogy, goes on to send a Tweet
to future generations: "A soldier of the Revolution."

Moore did
not die in battle but rather in the fullness of years. Still, he thought
enough of the American Revolution (1775-1783) and those who did
sacrifice their lives to remember them in his final farewell. He would
have been between 23 and 31 during the Revolution, just about the age
young men and women still go off to war today.

Looking at Moore's
gravestone recently, two questions crossed my mind: First, what might
his gravestone have said if the Americans had lost the Revolution? As
quickly as the thought arose, I dismissed it: My country is not yet
adult enough to remember the vanquished. But victory is not the
guarantor of honor. Victory is not the guarantor of peace. Victory is
the guarantor of memorial days. Days and weeks and years of
forgetfulness.

But second, why, in 91 years, would Moore's
gravestone choose to pass over the other 79 years of his life – the
times of peace, perhaps ... a time in August when the cut grass hung
heavy in the air; the time when, at last, he learned how to spell
"Egypt" correctly; the lingering, heart-skipping moment when he noticed
the blue ribbon that bound up her hair; or the single, gentle finger
that wiped a bit of drool from the cheek of a baby sleeping in his arms?

Cruelty
and sacrifice and bloodshed and loss are part and parcel of Memorial
Day. However imperfectly, the living remember what the dead have long
since set aside. But what is peace? Perhaps, to borrow from a Supreme
Court observation about pornography, I may not know what peace is, but I
know it when I see it.

Somehow, on this Memorial Day, I feel it
is my responsibility to bring the same fierce loyalty to peace that is
so often reserved only for bloodshed.

Adam Fisher lives in Northampton. His column appears monthly. He can be reached at genkakukigen@aol.com.

1 comment:

We say we are grateful for their sacrifice. We are grateful it was them and not us. And Grenada was part of that samsara too, the invasion and capture by Operation Urgent Fury. We make it sound so important and needful.

But even the one we call "the good war", where we're clearly the good guys stopping a bad guy, has been investigated by a few who concluded it was avoidable. But i imagine peace has less opportunity for windfall profits compared to the steady maintenance of life it allows.

My name is Adam Fisher. I live in Northampton, Mass., U.S.A. I have a wife and three children. This is my blog and consists of almost-daily postings -- sometimes (older) about the Zen Buddhism I have admired and practiced for something short of 50 years; sometimes about other 'spiritual' matters; and (more recently) about whatever strikes my fancy. Except to the extent that it might help others to consider what sort of fool they might prefer not to be, this blog does not aim to help anyone. Writing is an old and diminishing habit. It's what I do. Once upon a time, I built a zendo/meditation hall in the backyard here and invited people to come. The zendo is still there and my Dharma name is still "Genkaku" ("original realization" or "original understanding") but these days the formality of meditation has drained. Black Moon Zendo is still a good zendo, but I am 77 in 2017 ... creaky and disinclined. I honor those who make courageous journeys, but am hoist by my own observation that "Just because you are indispensable to the universe does not mean the universe needs your help." Best wishes to all. I can be contacted at genkakukigen@aol.com